Day: February 26, 2008

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Cal Poly selling OUR soul to Saudi Arabia

Pres. Warren Baker, Provost William Durgin, Senate Chair Bruno Giberti and their bud
You gotta know there must be big money behind this! I hope it’s not just for a few pieces of silver.
Today, Warren Baker and his buds blocked a full discussion by the academic senate at Cal Poly on the issue of Cal Poly and Saudi Arabia’s joint educational venture. Let’s not gloss over the fact that this issue ignores a bunch of stuff… no women need apply for starters. If this was apartheid South Africa, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.

What are they afraid of?

Talk about a PR nightmare!
In my last post, I had predicted this would happen! Fortunately, you can always depend on Cal Poly administrators to behave badly.

Cal Poly is so used to being a law unto themselves that they really don’t know how their inappropriate actions look to others. The Provost “Bill” Durgan appears to have spent a disproportionate amount of time on yours truly. I heard a lot about what he said… including this excerpt from a private email:

“The Provost also gave a fiery speech addressed to the all the critics of the Saudi proposal, including uncalled for attacks on a faculty spouse (without mentioning Roger by name) who is printing material on the web and said this is not how folks with Ph.D.s should be behaving. It shows a complete lack of respect for academic freedom, etc, etc………”

It is amusing to see Cal Poly’s administration quoting ‘academic freedom’ and ‘free speech’… when they have acted like the ‘bad guys’ in the Nation’s eyes! It doesn’t work the way they think it does.

So, what was the resolution? What is Cal Poly’s Administration so afraid of?

Check this out!

The only other interesting statement came from the Academic Senate Chair Bruno Giberti who referred to the resolution by many many former Faculty Academic Senate Chairs by dissing:

“I am not impressed with them! (5 former Faculty Senate Chairs).”

Spoken like a true company man. By the way, I know you are all sooo interested in who the academic senate is…. here’s a fun link!

Stay Tuned, This issue has traction!
Roger Freberg

UPDATE: It appears — according to some attending the meeting — that the Provost was complaining that some Cal Poly Faculty were not using their official Cal Poly email and that this was a BAD thing! I know that the ’employer’ has the right to read employees emails… but Bill wouldn’t do THAT??!!!  Nah!

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Faculty Questioning Cal Poly’s Saudi Connection

Cal Poly's Warren Baker & his Saudi Connection
It is rumored… and don’t we all love rumors… that Cal Poly’s Saudi Connection is being questioned by virtually all of the past chairs of the Faculty Academic Senate of Cal Poly. It seems like they want to formally show their disapproval. Obviously, the administration is desperately trying to invoke various parliamentary procedures and sycophants to try to silence the measure.

Time will tell if the controversial Dean of Engineering Mohammad Noori or President Warren Baker are successful in silencing their critics.

In the meantime, steve.chawkins@latimes.com of the Los Angeles Times has blown the ‘regional cover’ off the story with an article in today’s paper! An important part of the article was in it’s final summary statement:

“Look at South Africa,” he said. “The University of California divested from South Africa, along with the rest of the world, and apartheid came to an end.”

Cal Poly says that ‘we’re’ (those who think discrimination is not nice) trying to embarrass the Cal Poly administration… we’ll — my advice to Warren Baker — is to stop doing stupid and embarrassing things.

My other Cal Poly & Saudi Arabia Blogs:

Cal Poly & Saudi Arabia Part Deux

Cal Poly… training tomorrow’s terrorists?

Roger Freberg

we all have the power to stand up to wrong and it starts with one person willing to break from the pack

UPDATE! : OoOops.. it’s hitting the fan! Civilrights.org